Jack Schwager pointed at the hard part. There are a million ways to make money in the markets, and they are all hard to find. A sharper prediction does not close that gap, and a stronger opinion does not either. Profit is a math problem, and the math has to come out ahead before the story is allowed to matter.
01 Win often, at the same size
You can get paid by being right more often than you are wrong, as long as the wins and the losses stay about the same size. In that path the edge is the count of winners, not the size of any one of them. You do not need a huge winner if the small ones show up often enough to cover the losers and leave something over. If the losses start to grow past the wins, a high hit rate stops paying you.
02 Let the winner be twice the loser
You can also get paid when you are wrong a lot, if each winner is at least twice the loser you just took. Here you cut the loss while it is still small, and you let the winner run until it is large enough to matter. A method that is right only some of the time can still pay, because one good trade covers two bad ones and still has room left. The work is refusing to let a loser grow into the size of a winner, not the hunt for a better forecast.
03 Stay with the trend
Trend following is the plain version of being on the right side of the move in front of you. You are long when the market is rising, and you step aside or you are short when it is falling. You do not spend the trade arguing with the direction that is already on the chart. The profit comes from staying with the move long enough for it to pay, and from leaving once that move is finished. Fighting the trend is how a clever idea turns into a slow loss.
04 Trade a process you have already tested
A systematic process can pay when you have tested it on a sound idea, not on a curve that only fits the past. You follow the rules on the next trade the same way you followed them in the test. The point of the test is to know the method had an edge before your money was in it. A process you rewrite after every loss is no longer the process you tested, and the old result no longer applies.
05 Own the stocks that are already winning
You can buy the growth stocks that already lead their sector and their industry, and then hold them. These are the names that are winning the comparison, not the ones you hope will catch up later. The path pays if the leader keeps leading and you can sit still while it does. It stops paying when you swap that leader for a story that has not won anything yet.
06 Buy with a real margin of safety
You can also buy a sound company when the price sits far below what the business is worth, and hold it for years. The gap between the price and that worth is the margin of safety, so a small error in your view does not ruin the purchase. This path is slow, and waiting is part of the method, so you need to know why you own the shares before the price moves. A price that has not moved is not, by itself, a reason to leave.
07 Buy fear when the crowd cannot hold
You can buy when a crash has turned the crowd fearful and prices have already been pushed down hard. You are not trying to call the bottom. You are trying to buy when other people cannot stand to keep holding what they own. The mirror of that path is being short near the top of a bubble, when the crowd is sure the rise cannot end. That side belongs on the list so the list stays complete, and it is not taught here.
08 Sell the unlikely option, and keep a hedge
You can sell option contracts that are unlikely to finish in the money, and you keep a hedge in place while you do it. You are being paid for time, and for a result the market already treats as rare. The hedge is not a decoration on this path. Without it, the rare result is the one that can take the account. With the hedge on, the small payments can add up, and the bad day has a limit.
09 Buy the cheap option until one pays
The other option path runs the other way. You buy small options that sit far out of the money, and you do it over and over. Most of them will expire worthless, and you accept that before you start. The path pays only when one win is large enough to cover that long string of small losses and still leave a profit. If each buy is so large that the string knocks you out first, the math never gets its turn.
10 Demand that the expectancy stays positive
Positive expectancy is the test that sits under every path on this page. Take the share of trades you win and multiply it by the average win. Take the share you lose and multiply that by the average loss. Subtract the second result from the first, and then multiply by how often you take the trade. If the result sits above zero, the method can pay you. If it sits below zero, saying it with more confidence will not repair it. You can put those steps in a sheet. The labels matter less than the sign of the answer.
Pick one path and learn its math before you go hunting for a second one.
The ways to get paid are hard to find, and they stay hard if you treat them as opinions. They get easier to judge once you can tell whether the wins are large enough, and often enough, to cover what the losses take.